Slow Homecoming

by Peter Handke

  “Our neighbor is looking well today,” said the lady of the house, who sat there with her hands in her lap, inspecting him. In reply to which her husband said: “Like a happy man with a destiny.” The children looked at him, frowned, and ran outside to play hide-and-seek with the dogs in the tall grass.

  True enough, on the morning after his night of rigidity, Sorger was less anonymous-looking than usual; ordinarily, in a group of bus drivers, electricians, or house painters, he could be mistaken for one of them. His body seemed to have broadened, his face was serene, more so each time you looked at it, as only the face of a leading man can be (his feeling about the preceding night was that he had played a part successfully); his eyes stood deeper in their sockets, and sparkled with omniscience: a man worth looking at. “Yes,” he said, “today my power emanates from me.”

  Like Sorger, the family hailed from Central Europe, and like Sorger they had been living for years on the west coast of the other continent; in his eyes the man and woman were a true couple, whose love had thus far struck him as credible. The children, on the other hand, seemed fortuitous, witnesses to the marriage rather than bona-fide members of the family; often they just stood there looking on in amazement as the grownups played.

  Sorger’s first impression had been: “A pair of innocents.” Yes, innocent they were, but that turned out to be their brand of kindness: in the course of time, it transferred itself to the less innocent Sorger, who in their company managed to feel guileless. When he came to know them, he felt sure they must have started out as two afflicted halves falling into each other’s arms. They sometimes seemed backward and even ugly in their backwardness. Still, they occupied his imagination, they were indeed the content that made it possible—hardly anyone else prompted Sorger to such tranquil imaginings (instead of imprisoning him in conventional fantasies). All in all, one could think only good of them as a subject for the imagination.

  The husband came of a wealthy family but never learned to show it (even in counter-gestures). He was willing, but inept. He was willing and inept in many things, but then unexpectedly he would “enchant” one, if only with a glance or a word. His wife was a “villager”; at first sight she seemed a type from the “cottagy” zones that have sprung up around old-time villages, where people banished forever behind windowpanes have nothing else to do but cast unforgiving glances at the idle tourists who pass by. But it soon became impossible to see her in this light; only in her moments of stubbornness was she “petty” or “malignant”—and she grew stubborn whenever someone concealed his true nature from her. Sorger often saw her “at the window,” but her look was always one of friendly sympathy; she felt a patient love for all human frailty, but quickly turned away from anyone in whom she found no weakness. Her way of looking at people (so Sorger found out over the years) was not angry but disillusioned and offended. Once again a man who had seen himself as the lord of creation had rebuffed her. Though she found fault with her husband, she looked upon him and him alone with unflagging compassion, and sometimes Sorger saw this same look (more polite to be sure, and not quite so candid, but for that reason all the more effective) directed toward himself.

  Unassuming, awkward and slow in everything she did—others would be frantically waiting for her, while she was still absorbed in something they had begun together—she was nevertheless the exemplary one of the two, and it was only through her that the husband could be recognized as a person in his own right. This (to his own chagrin) mediocre, often impersonal man had once been discovered by her who was more, and even now it was only her presence that gave him a character of his own. His wife did not flatter him, but, herself a proud woman, she could admire him so completely that he forgot his inner contradictions and, deeply moved, believed her as a man believes “one of his own people.” She was also moved by him, but for the sole reason that the two of them had once been pronounced man and wife. To her, who seemed free from servitude to all current opinions, marriage remained a sacrament, in which “the dispersed senses” were gathered together and made one, in which sympathy for others was greatly enhanced and made into an inexhaustible source of life. But what made her exemplary to Sorger’s mind was that, for her, “others” were not confined to her husband (though he remained the man of her life), but included everyone, even a stranger. For her, marriage had become a form which preserved her childlike openness and expanded it into a sense of unconstrained fellowship, very different from a mere adult’s sense of duty. (Sorger often saw her inactive; she liked to be waited on, and the children called her “lazybones.”)

  There was nothing oppressive about this couple. They showed no sign of worrying about each other. It was simply unthinkable that they would ever die. Altogether, were they anything more to Sorger than convenient next-door neighbors? (The husband sometimes took him to town with him, and the wife had often quietly attended to little household chores that he was just about to undertake.) Their relationship had grown with living together and had developed without abrupt mutations. There had never been any confidences; for instance, one had never told the other what he had thought of him at the beginning of their acquaintance. Sorger didn’t even know exactly what the husband did for a living—only that he had an “office” in town. They were simply “the neighbors,” and yet at heart Sorger counted them as friends; like letters, his thoughts of them often ended with good wishes, and he would not have wanted them to go out of his life.

  Thus far, Sorger had written a few papers, for the most part general descriptions of a limited territory or comparative studies of similar phenomena in different parts of the world. In his projected essay “On Spatial Configurations” he would have to abandon the conventions of his science, which at the most might occasionally help him to structure his imagination.

  He had long been preoccupied by the fact that in every landscape consciousness gradually creates its own configurations, even when there seem to be no delimiting features as far as the eye can see. A person who lives for some time in a region seems to find a variety of distinct configurations in what on his arrival had looked like an endless plain surface. But even in a hilly or mountainous region the articulations of which were evident at first sight, quite different configurations arose (in Sorger’s experience) from those discernible in the obvious monumental features.

  His point of departure was that in any countryside whatever, if only the mind has time to form ties with it, characteristic forms reveal themselves; and, above all, that these forms are created not by the immediately evident, dominant features of the landscape but by inconspicuous elements which no scientific insight can lay bare (and which can be discovered only in the course of time lived day after day in these surroundings, perhaps only through repeated stumbling over the same piece of ground, through the involuntary change of gait caused by a spongy—once swampy—bit of meadow, the change of acoustic horizon in a gully, or the suddenly modified view from the vestiges, however tiny, of a morainic mound in a wheat field).

  Another thing that stimulated Sorger’s scientific curiosity was that most of these localities were not the mere fantasies of an individual, but bore traditional names. Rediscovered by an individual, they proved to have long been known to the local community, to figure in land registers and geological surveys with names that were often centuries old. The question then arose: which of these unimpressive forms could achieve autonomy (as such and such “meadow” or “hill” or “glen”) and take its place in the daily life of a remote settlement, or of a big city, for that matter? What colors conspired, what substances—what special features? Here Sorger could still use the approved methods, but all the rest (his motivation as well as his dream of confining himself to the pure, unexplained description of these forms) was, in a manner of speaking, the geography of childhood.

  And, indeed, that had been Sorger’s original idea: to describe the shapes of fields in (his) childhood; to draw plans of very different “points of interest”; to prepare cross and longitudinal sections of all
these seemingly impenetrable configurations of childhood, which in retrospect added up to the feeling of being at home—not only for children but for himself as well. He wished, in the year of freedom that was to begin for him in a few weeks, to explore such spots all over Europe, especially in regions where he himself had known them. He knew, of course, that such “play” (or whatever it might be) could be of no use, but he often dreamed of it, anticipated it with joy or trepidation, as though everything depended on it. And when it was with joy, he was conscious of a new daring, he felt almost invulnerable. He would be making a leap, possibly to nowhere, but at least away from something.

  He had never thought of himself as a scientist, but at the most (occasionally) as a conscientious describer of landscapes. As such, to be sure, he sometimes felt as excited as if he had invented the landscape—and as an inventor he knew that he could not possibly be wicked or selflessly good but was, in his work, an ideal human being. But then it might occur to him that perhaps he was doing good after all, not by giving something to others but by not betraying them. And this non-betrayal was not a failure to do something; it was a strenuous activity. At times he felt that his study of landscape was a science of peace.

  “To bring peace to life.” On the very day of his return, he had set out with a camp chair under his arm. Beneath the afternoon sun, he walked along the shore to the bay where Earthquake Park was situated. (His walk brought it home to him that the city was on the sea.) There he sat down on a hillock to sketch a profile of the terrain.

  This park had not been landscaped. It was just a piece of land that had been torn loose by the earthquake and subsequently labeled “park.” At first sight, there was nothing very striking about it. A broad expanse sloping gently toward the ocean, covered sparsely with bushes rather than the pine woods usual in the region; no vestiges of houses or cars jutting out of the clay soil, which had become quite firm again, forming a humped terrain, bare except for the bushes, and crisscrossed with paths made by hikers. The old fissures had formed small valleys or gullies, which zigzagged between the humps. Sorger had the impression that the walkers he saw there emerged from the alleys of a strange clay city and quickly vanished into other hidden byways; but for a long while their voices remained audible behind the walls, a phenomenon otherwise known to him only from Europe.

  Sketching made him feel warm, and the water of the bay in the background came closer. Nothing distracted his attention, and he had plenty of time. His “subject” began to answer his gaze. Himself expressionless, he waited in the landscape for a “figure” to emerge. “Only in immersion do I see what the world is.”

  He was sketching a tract of land which the tremor had turned upside down, raising an underground stratum to the surface; the thin root ends of the trees that had once grown there could still be seen among the new grass (a mixture of old and new sometimes brought about by avalanches). It was a small tract, yet in it different strata could clearly be seen to disperse in all directions—and in ever minute change of direction Sorger, as he sketched, could sense the overpowering force of the tremor.

  He was on the track of something and his lines, at first almost fussily close together, began to diverge; they were aiming at something beyond physical reality. With excitement, he observed how the formless mound of clay transformed itself into a grimace; and then he knew he had seen that grimace before—at the Indian woman’s house, on the dance mask that was supposed to represent an earthquake.

  The forehead of the mask was edged with bright-colored feathers, and these he now found again in the fringe of grass. Wooden pegs took the place of eyes; these were the roots; the nostrils were thinner wooden pegs. However, it was not directly in nature that Sorger saw the mask but in his sketch of nature; and he did not actually rediscover this particular mask; rather, he gained a sudden understanding of masks in general. This led to the idea of a series of dance steps, and in a single moment Sorger experienced the earthquake and the human earthquake dance.

  “There is a possible connection,” he wrote under his sketch. “Every moment of my life is connected with every other—without intermediate links. The connection is there; I need only imagine in full freedom.”

  The setting sun revealed two women in one of the passages between hills. The light fell on their hips, and they were so splendid and so full of life that Sorger, fired with enthusiasm, cried out: “Are you movie stars?” To which they replied: “Are you a soldier?” And from the “valley” that had seemed so far below him they immediately took a few steps up to where he was standing.

  Sorger knew that if he seriously wanted these women he could have them. Here everything was possible: the first casual contact, as he was just standing there, passed through cloth and leather; and instantly the three of them were one. He was not a “seducer,” simply someone who was ready for these women who had been waiting for someone like himself.

  Still sketching, Sorger tried to defend himself against his sudden power, but the women interrupted him: “Let yourself go.” How beautifully irresponsible these adventuresses were. And their beauty was in the right. Or did he know of any other law?

  They were even capable of being serious, and with them he experienced the triumph of perfect presence of mind. “The sun went down and all roads were bathed in shadow.” He didn’t ask them to go with him; they followed him.

  Not only was their irresponsibility right; it was magnificent. The coldness of their fingernails. The clarity of their entrails. In the warm night he saw himself stretched from continent to continent and these women ministering to him as they would not do again for a long, long time.

  After his apparitions left him, he sat in the dark, gazing at the house next door. “No, you were real,” he protested, drank the wine that was left in the three glasses, and wished for rain, which, lo and behold, began to splatter down among the pines.

  The lighted window of the children’s room formed a yellow tent in which stood a black rocking horse. Sorger went out into the tall grass and tried to get wet; but his body was so hot that the drops dried instantly. The horizon was an inky strip over the ocean: in it the closed eyelids of the strange women still trembled, and the empty rooms were now filled with their cries.

  The center of the city was situated on an arm of the sea that cut deep into the land (the low apartment houses and the colonized woods on the ocean front were only excrescences); consequently, the city as such was a kind of urban satellite, impossible to localize and independent of the earth, which had become an unattainably remote past. Long, long ago something had happened there—loving encounters in lucky times, outbreaks of war when the luck was bad—which in this part of the world had ceased to stir the imagination. (The concrete world-war fortifications on the rocky part of the coast had become incomprehensible testimony to a common prehistory.) The planet seemed to have become a machine sheltered from all complications; there was still a distinction of sorts between “lucky” and “unlucky”; luck was interpreted as no more than an absence of consequences, while “bad luck” consisted in being done away with for no reason at all; both were impersonal processes, and individual destinies had simply gone out of existence.

  The worst of it was that there no longer seemed to be anything for people to do. The city was inconspicuously automated, as though for all time; only here and there was there room for a few improvements. In this perfected city, day and night seemed to turn each other on and off, without the dawn and dusk of the old uncertain times; and from inside the machine (instead of the sorrowful voice of a “people”) came an all-purpose answer that helped one to go on.

  Toward evening the mist, usually coming from the sea, took hold of the city and the back country. It evaporated in the next day’s sun, which burst like a chariot through the whirls of mist, and grew larger and larger. In an instant the day grew hot and glaring, the houses white, and the sky blue. No autumn colors on the thick leaves, which fell quickly and almost vertically from the trees, and in this “sun of reprieve”—tha
t was Sorger’s feeling about it—he moved this way and that, never without his burden (after all, he could revoke his reprieve at the next corner), and never afraid (for he was not confronting a superior outside power), but—suddenly aghast at himself—always resolutely irresponsible.

  He was not idle, and yet he would never have claimed to be working; what was lacking was the daily exertion it would have cost this ordinarily sluggish man to transform himself into someone else; as long as he was doing something, he was agile, as though engaged in one job among others, or in a pastime.

  In this sort of solitary occupation, he needed no one (his neighbors had ceased to be anything more than distant sounds in the woods), and (just as he wished) no one needed him. Though he knew the city well, every time he set out to go somewhere it ended in a detour, as though he had gone astray; he would “stray” into a church, to the ocean, to a nightclub. True, he never lost his sense of direction, but it made him wander instead of keeping him awake as usual. Wherever he ended up, he had got there without a decision; it was only afterwards that he thought to himself: Oh well, now I’m here.

  The two cardinal points which had always meant something to Sorger were north and west. But at present the words West Coast seemed to apply not to the whole length of the continent but only to a small zone distinct from everything else, not to a vast expanse but, like the term West End, to a mere part of a city. Here too, to be sure, Sorger found the polygons of dried mud known to him from the northern bank of the river (in the networks of asphalt cracked by earthquakes or in the sun-resistant coating of certain shop windows, which in peeling seemed to form deliberate patterns); but their similarities struck him as fortuitous, derisive. This world was not “old” like the river landscape of the Far North (which went on aging visibly, and the viewer with it), but remained unsuspectingly young, thrusting Sorger back into a time when, as he now recognized, he had been no better than an obstinately frivolous consumer. “Who is the king of this town?” he heard himself asking.